“I told her there had been no word between us. That we were not Two-ing. Yet. Much.”
“It doesn’t have to be now!” I cried, grabbing both her hands.
“Oh, Salla! Now we can afford to wait!” And I yanked her off the spur into the maddest wildest flight of my life. Like a couple of crazy things we split and resplit the air above Baldy, soaring and diving like drunken lightning. But all the time part: of us was moving so far, so fast, another part of us was talking quietly together, planning, wondering, rejoicing, as serenely as if we were back in the cave again, seeing each other in quiet reflective eyes. Finally darkness closed in entirely and we leaned exhausted against each other, drifting slowly toward the canyon floor.
“Obla-” I said, “let’s go tell Obla.” There was no need to shield any part of my life from Salla any more. In fact there was a need to make it a cohesive whole, complete with both Obla and Salla.
Obla’s windows were dark. That meant no one was visiting her. She would be alone. I rapped lightly on the door-my own particular rap.
“Bram? Come in!” I caught welcome from Obla.
“I brought Salla,” I said. “Let me turn the light on.” I stepped in.
“Wait-“
But simultaneously with her cry I flipped the light switch.
“Salla,” I started, “this is-“
Salla screamed and threw her arm across her eyes; a sudden overflooding of horrified revulsion choked the room, and Obla was fluttering in the far upper corner of the room-hiding-hiding herself behind the agonized swirl of her hair, her broken body in the twisting of her white gown, pressing itself to the walls, struggling for escape, her startled physical and mental anguish moaning almost audibly around us.
I grabbed Salla and yanked her out of the room, snapping the light off as we went. I dragged her out to the edge of the yard where the canyon walls shot upward. I flung her against the sandstone wall. She turned and hid her face against the rock, sobbing. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.
“‘How could you!” I gritted between my teeth, outraged anger thickening my words. “Is that the kind of people the Home is turning out now? Counting arms and legs and eyes more than the person?” Her tumbling hair whipped across my chin. “Permitting rejection and disgust for any living soul? Aren’t you taught even common kindness and compassion?” I wanted to hit her-to hit anything solid to protest this unthinkable thing that had been done to Obla, this unhealable wounding.
Salla snatched herself out of my grasp and hovered just out of reach, wet eyes glaring angrily down at me.
“It’s your fault, too!” she snapped, tears flowing. “I’d have died rather than do a thing like that to Obla or anyone else-if I had known! You didn’t tell me. You never visualized her that way-only strength and beauty and wholeness!”
“Why not!” I shot back angrily, lifting-level with her. “That’s the only way I ever see her any more. And trying to shift the blame-“
“It is your fault! Oh, Bram!” And she was crying in my arms. When she could speak again between sniffs and hiccoughs she said, “‘We don’t have people like that at Home. I mean, I never saw a-an incomplete person. I never saw scars and mutilation. Don’t you see, Bram? I was holding myself ready to receive her, completely-because she was part of you. And then to find myself embracing-” She choked. “Look-look, Bram, we have transgraph and-and regeneration-and no one ever stays unfinished.”
I let go of her slowly, lost in wonder. “Regeneration? Transgraph?”
“Yes, yes!” Salla cried. “She can have back her legs. She can have arms again. She can have her beautiful face again. She may even get back her eyes and her voice, though I don’t know for sure about that. She can be Obla again, instead of a dark prison for Obla.”
“No one told us.”
“No one asked.”
“‘Common concern.”
“I’ll ask then. Have you any dobic children? And cases of cazerinea? Any trimorph semia? It’s not that we don’t want to ask. How are we to know what to ask? We’ve never even heard of a-a basket case.” She took the word from me. “It just didn’t occur to us to ask.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, drying her eyes with the palms of my hands, lacking anything better. “I should have told you.” My words were but scant surface indications of my deep abject apology.
“Come,” she said, pulling away from me. “We must go to Obla-now-right now.”
It was Salla who finally coaxed Obla back down to her bed. It was Salla who held the broken weeping face against her slight young shoulder and poured the healing balms of her sorrow and understanding over Obla’s wounds. And it was Salla who told Obla of what the Home held for her. Told her and told her and told her, until Obla finally believed.
All three of us were limp and weary by then, and all three content just to sit for a minute, so the explosion of Davy into the room was twice the shock it ordinarily would have been.
“Hi, Bram! Hi, Salla! Hey, Obla! I got it fixed now. It won’t hiss on the s’s any more and you can trip the playback yourself. Here.” He plopped onto her pillow the little cube I recognized as his scriber. “Try it out. Go on. Try it out on Bram.”
Obla turned her face until her cheek felt the cube. Salla looked at me in wonderment and then at Obla. There was a brief pause and then a slight click and I heard, tiny but distinct, the first audible word I’d ever heard from Obla.
“Bram! Oh, Bram! Now I can go with you. I won’t be left behind. And when we get to the Home I’ll be whole again! Whole again!”
Through my shock I heard Davy say, “You didn’t even use one s, Obla! Say something essy, so’s I can check
